I've spent almost my entire career as a journalist covering tech in and around Silicon Valley, meeting entrepreneurs, executives and engineers, watching companies rise and fall (or in the case of Apple, rise, fall and rise again) and attending confabs and conferences. Before joining Forbes in February 2012, I had a very brief stint in corporate communications at HP (on purpose) and worked for more than six years on the tech team at Bloomberg News, where I dived into the financial side of tech. Before that, I was Silicon Valley bureau chief for Interactive Week, a contributor to Wired and Upside, and a reporter and news editor for MacWeek. The first computer game I ever played was Zork, my collection of now-vintage tech T-shirts includes a tie-dye BMUG classic and a HyperCard shirt featuring a dog and fire hydrant. When I can work at home, I settle into the black Herman Miller Aeron chair that I picked up when NeXT closed its doors. You can email me at cguglielmo@forbes.com.

Following the lead set by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who earlier this month said Apple should open its operating systems and allow users to modify and extend the architectures behind the iPhone, iPad and Mac, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Apple products are “beautiful crystal prisons” and the company should “open its platforms for those who wish to tinker, tweak and innovate with their internals.”

Analysts disagree, saying Apple’s “curated, end-to-end” or “closed” approach has won the endorsement of the most important audience — its customers.

“While Apple’s products have many virtues, they are marred by an ugly set of restrictions on what users and programmers can do with them,” Micah Lee, the EFF’s Web developer, and Peter Eckersley, technology projects director for the advocacy organization, said in a post today entitled “Apple’s Crystal Prison and the Future of Open Platforms.” “Apple’s recent products, especially their mobile iOS devices, are like beautiful crystal prisons, with a wide range of restrictions imposed by the OS, the hardware, and Apple’s contracts with carriers as well as contracts with developers. Only users who can hack or ‘jailbreak’ their devices can escape these limitations.

Apple has enjoyed soaring success — with sales last year of more than $100 billion — on demand for its iPhone, iPad and Macintosh computers. While the Cupertino, California-based company is praised by users for the elegance and simplicity of its product designs and software, and the (mostly) seamless way its products and services like the iTunes store work together, Apple is also criticized for restricting which apps it allows to run on its mobile devices.

“I think that Apple could be just as strong and good and be open, but how can you challenge it when a company is making that much money?” Wozniak said while on a tour of Australia earlier this month. He has been open about calling for a programming language that would allow engineers and developers to modify the iPad.

“I’m glad for the EFF’s stance,” Wozniak said in an email today, adding that he doesn’t have any specific proposals. “What I like is pretty much available through legal jailbreaking so it’s almost a moot point.”

“If Steve Jobs were alive, he’d probably go over and TP Wozniak’s house,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst with The Enderle Group in San Jose, California. “At his heart, he’s a coder. But he doesn’t represent the ideal customer. Apple’s products continue to test high in quality and customer satisfaction because Apple maintains the customer experience and it can do that because it’s a closed system.”

Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with Gartner Inc., says the debate about open vs. closed is “much ado about very little” by a small subset of users ” who like to install new operating systems on their mobile phones on a Saturday afternoon for social entertainment.”

“ Apple’s customers have voted overwhelmingly with their wallets they like the curated, end-to-end experience,” Gartenberg said today. “You want to call it closed, call it closed. Consumers have no problem with it. We’re talking about the super uber technical enthusiast who may want to install whatever they want. They can jailbreak their device. But I think for most consumers, it’s an absolute and total non-issue.”

The EFF duo, who also call for a mobile users “bill of rights,” acknowledge that Apple didn’t “invent the culture of imposing restrictions on what kinds of programs people could run on the computers in their pockets.” They vent their frustration with mobile phone makers and carriers who have been “making life miserable for programmers long before Apple entered the smartphone market, and writing code for phones in those days was described as a ‘tarpit of misery, pain and destruction’.”

But, they say, Apple, now the world’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of $535.1 billion has the market clout with its brand and stature to set a new trend for openness — just as Microsoft is planning to copy Apple’s model with its new Windows RT tablets and “denying their users the right to chose an alternative OS or modify the one they paid for.” Their proposed bill or rights includes allowing users to install whatever apps and OS they want on their mobile phone, and offering hardware warranties separate from software warranties since users who modify, or jailbreak, their iPhones are denied warranty coverage today.

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